Not news to me that windows being sucked into the Dock are “live” (try the slow-minimize effect with a running QuickTime movie, for example), but this is a neat trick nonetheless, and it’s one of those things most people probably don’t realize. (Thanks to Chris Ryland for the link.)

Tuesday, 29 August 2006

Very well-done new app ($18) for sharing your iTunes music over the Internet. You select which of your playlists you want to share, and Musicast runs a web server on your Mac that shares those songs. The web interface has a very slick UI (as does the Musicast app itself), and it also publishes your playlists in RSS format for iTunes (or whatever other feed reader you want to use).

He’s set up a special line where he forwards telemarketers, with a playback loop full of comments intended to keep them on the line for as long as possible (“Why don’t you tell me a bit more about what you’re offering…”). He’s recording the resulting calls and posting the funniest ones.

I’ve long thought that equating pageviews with popularity leads to site design that requires users to reload pages over and over — e.g. the way many “news” sites break up articles into two or three pages to load.

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

Universal has apparently agreed to participate in SpiralFrog, an upcoming new music service that plans to make music available without charge, but to get the downloads, you’ll have to sit through advertisements (or perhaps the ads will be attached to the downloaded songs?), and the music will be encoded in a protected WMA format, which means it won’t work on iPods. And users will have to keep coming back to the SpiralFrog web site once per month to watch more ads to keep all of their previous downloads enabled.

I smell yet another dud.

Monday, 28 August 2006

Some sort of backup functionality belongs in the OS. It’s been a long time coming. The fact that it wasn’t there left opportunities for third parties, but that doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t address the missing functionality.

On a Windows PC, software (both good and evil) can change the system without your even knowing about it. In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password. You’re the decider. You approve changes to your system.

$15 mouse hack for Mac OS X adds focus-follows-mouse behavior, along with the ability to resize, move, and identify background windows without clicking on them. I wouldn’t use this, but it might be popular with recent switchers who gripe about the focus-follows-mouse thing. (Via Jesper via AIM.)

Last month, developer Simon Haertel stopped distributing his excellent freeware game Quinn after receiving a legal nastygram from The Tetris Company. After evaluating his legal position, Quinn is back, and now described thusly:

Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game, which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here.

Saturday, 26 August 2006

Matt Neuburg on the rather crummy food and accommodations at WWDC 2006 earlier this month:

Lunches were plastic salad and plastic sandwiches in plastic
containers; breakfast was nearly non-existent. Snacks between
talks were dried-up pastry. One evening there was something that
pretended to be pizza; it was so bad that people were literally
gasping in disbelief.

Probably more money than Creative ever made selling their players, and a relative drop in the bucket on Apple’s part — even if they’d continued to fight it, they would have spent tens of millions in legal fees, and they would have risked a fiasco like what happened to BlackBerry maker RIM.

“Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “This settlement resolves all of our differences with Creative, including the five lawsuits currently pending between the companies, and removes the uncertainty and distraction of prolonged litigation.”

I love that dig from Jobs in the first sentence. He couldn’t even let the PR go out without making it clear that he hates giving them a nickel for that patent.

What a dumb idea. YouTube is feared and despised by the record/movie/TV companies that Apple is courting for the iTunes Music Store. I love YouTube, but the simple truth is that their stock in trade is redistributing without permission video clips whose copyrights are held by others. (Also: “Steve Jobs” wouldn’t be the one to buy YouTube; “Apple Computer” would.)

Monday, 21 August 2006

Battery exchange program for “certain rechargeable batteries that were sold for use with 15-inch MacBook Pro computer systems from February 2006 through May 2006”. Not, however, a safety issue; they’re being recalled because they “do not meet [Apple’s] high standards for battery performance”.

Google Analytics — based on the web stats package formerly known as Urchin — is now open for anyone, for free. I’ve been using it for a few days and it’s pretty nice. My biggest complaint so far is that it shows almost no information at all about your incoming referrers.

What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar. Once that came out, not only
did Kiko’s growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected. Justin
and Emmett told me a large fraction of Kiko’s users had Gmail
addresses.

Apple Computer Inc.’s investigation into claims of poor conditions at a Chinese iPod factory found no forced labor but revealed that workers were exceeding the company’s limits on hours and days to be worked per week, the company said Friday.

Thursday, 17 August 2006

Apple has published a report on their investigation regarding charges of poor living and working conditions at a Chinese factory where iPods are manufactured:

In response to the allegations, we immediately dispatched an audit team comprised of members from our human resources, legal and operations groups to carry out a thorough investigation of the conditions at the manufacturing site. The audit covered the areas of labor standards, working and living environment, compensation, overtime and worker treatment.

“Despite SecureWorks being quoted saying the Mac is threatened by the exploit demonstrated at Black Hat, they have provided no evidence that in fact it is,” Apple Director of Mac PR, Lynn Fox, told Macworld.

Low End Mac’s index page for 68K-based PowerBooks. Apple shipped over 20 different notebooks using the “PowerBook” brand before the switch to PowerPC processors. The “Power” in “PowerBook” did not stand for “PowerPC”.

September 4, 1972. One of my very favorite TV shows as a kid. I’ve always been a fan of Bob Barker — the guy knows how to host a game show, and you can tell from this clip that he had it down pat right from the start. The fact that stuff like this is on YouTube is just amazing. (Via Digg.)

Holy smokes, the security staff at Moscone West are assholes. They’re a blemish on the otherwise pleasant experience of WWDC — imagine, you are busy talking about some new idea and some fat woman, smacking her gum, leans into you and yells USE THE OTHER DOOR. TURN YOUR BADGE AROUND. YOU CAN’T USE THIS ESCALATOR.

Why were they keeping people from using the up escalator right by the front doors?

Adds support for new Intel-based Macs, iSight cameras, right-clicking in Windows by holding the right-hand Apple key (no idea why only the right one), and installing Windows XP on any internal disk. Recommended for anyone using previous versions of Boot Camp.

Update: Apparently the new right-clicking feature only uses the right-side Apple key because the left one is mapped as the Windows key; in previous Boot Camp betas the right-side Apple key did nothing. It also occurs to me that this feature really only ought to matter to notebook users; desktop users can just get a real multi-button mouse.

Tuesday, 15 August 2006

Sun’s new UltraSPARC servers are so energy-efficient that California’s PG&E utility company is offering a rebate to companies that use them. Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz writes:

If you ever get asked by a cynic, or your management “what’s the real value of being green?,” I can give you a very specific answer, at least for Sun. In the State of California, it’s worth $700 to $1000 per server. I did say per server. Every single bid we’re in across the state just got $700 to $1,000 per server more competitive.

Monday, 14 August 2006

That same month, a Dell notebook in the cab of a pickup parked alongside Lake Mead in Nevada caught fire, igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks. The truck exploded. “A few minutes later and we’d have been coming up out of the canyon when the notebook blew up,” said Thomas Forqueran, owner of the laptop and truck. “Somebody is going to wind up getting killed.”

Yikes. The 4.1 million batteries they’re recalling constitute the largest safety recall in consumer electronics history.

No gloating, though: this might be a problem with many lithium-ion batteries manufactured by Sony, not a problem specific to Dell.

We put four 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives inside the Mac Pro. We booted from the original factory boot drive which we installed in a GLYPH external SATA-to-FW800 enclosure. We had strange results. Weird results.

Buy a Mac Pro (or any other Mac hardware) at Amazon via this link and help support Daring Fireball. (Considering how many people I met at WWDC who have already ordered one, I clearly should have done this last week.)

Also: Anyone who orders a new Mac from Amazon via the Daring Fireball referral link gets a free one-year DF membership. I can’t track this automatically, so you’ll have to email me after placing your order and I’ll create (or extend) your membership by hand.

Sunday, 13 August 2006

Keith Stattenfield, who was the lead engineer for Mac OS 9.0 and 9.1, tried three times to correct an egregious error in the Wikipedia entry for Mac OS 9, but his correction kept getting yanked.

I see now that the entry has been updated, but rather than just remove the falsehood completely, it’s been edited to say that it’s something that “some people have incorrectly claimed”, with a link to the false AppleInsider story that made the claim. If you know it’s incorrect, why mention it at all?

I’ve just put up a prototype of something I call the Atom Protocol
Exerciser. It might evolve to become a sanity-checking tool
something along the lines of the Feed Validator. I don’t want to
call it a “validator” because a feed can be said unambiguously to
be valid, or not; but a publishing-system interface might be
unusably buggy or slow or have moronic authentication policies;
all the Exerciser (let’s just say “the Ape” for short) does is
perform a bunch of operations that a typical APP client might, and
report the results.

Friday, 11 August 2006

Leander “Cult of Mac” Kahney, complaining that he was bored by the
WWDC keynote address:

Granted, the system as a whole looks slick, and Jobs said he was
keeping some new features “top secret” to stop Microsoft from
copying them. But the sneak peek just confirmed what we already
know: OS X is so mature and polished, major system upgrades are
more about tweaks than big new functions. (Yeah, I know there’s
a lot of technical wizardry under the hood, but that’s for the
geeks).

[…]

This week’s developer’s conference is a big show for Mac nerds.
More than 4,000 of them paid a pretty penny to be here this
week, and Jobs’ talk is the highlight of the show. For many of
them, this is the only chance they get to see their hero in the
flesh.

Kahney seems to have completely missed that this was Apple’s World
Wide Developers Conference, not the World Wide Jackass
Non-Technical
I-Treat-the-Mac-as-a-Cult-Rather-Than-a-Computing-Platform Hack
Conference.

WWDC attendees didn’t spend “a pretty penny” to see the fucking
keynote; they spent their money so they could get the technical
low-down on what’s new in 10.5, and so they could get face time with
Apple engineers. Apple announced a lot of cool new stuff: garbage
collection for Objective-C, Xcode 3.0, Core Animation, 64-bit
support for the entire OS, the first new interface for Interface
Builder since way back in the Next era — the list of “cool new
shit” that was announced is really pretty long.

Complaining that the announcements at WWDC only appealed to “the geeks” is like going to a rock concert and complaining that all they did was play loud music.

I was not previously aware of this particular connotation of the word “irregularities”. This is starting to sound Not Good.

As for Apple, deeper trouble could be signified by its use of the
term “irregularities” to describe what initial inquiries into
grant practices had found. That term was used again in the
announcement earlier this month indicating that options problems
were bad enough to require a restatement of past earnings.

Several Silicon Valley defense lawyers — all of whom spoke on
condition of anonymity because they have ties either to Apple or
to other backdating cases — said that in accounting parlance,
“irregularities” generally indicates a problem that’s not
accidental.

Eric Schwiebert from the Mac BU on Microsoft’s decision to drop support for Visual Basic in the upcoming release of Office for Mac. This is an extraordinarily comprehensive and technical overview of the reasons behind their decision — before the era of weblogs, we’d never have gotten anything other than a message filtered through Microsoft’s marketing department.

Xcode 3 adds an innovative UI for code folding, where the gutter gets darker as an indication of the indent level. Objective-C 2.0 adds garbage collection and a foreach-style variant of the for loop for iterating. Apple says Xcode 3 was written using Objective-C 2 with garbage collection turned on.

Lots and lots of open source announcements from Apple, including the x86 kernel source code, Apache-licensed Bonjour and Launchd source code, and a new “Mac OS Forge” community web site to host these projects.

Open source Windows web browser based on Apple’s Web Kit rendering engine. Not sure if they really mean “Web Kit” instead of “WebCore”, and using that icon is almost certainly a no-no that’ll spark a nastygram from Apple’s lawyers.

Friday, 4 August 2006

Ellch and Maynor didn’t present a paper titled, “we can create a covert channel by having control of the software on both sides of a communication link” because its trivial to do so. Instead they did exacty that, but colored it so people would be mystified, perplexed and think that there was some new exploit buried deep in the 802.11 protocol, when, point-in-fact, there is not.

Apple Computer Inc. shares sank nearly 5 percent Friday, a day after the computer and software maker said it expects to restate some of its financial results as a probe into its granting of stock options widens, threatening years of profit.

Interesting WINE-like library for porting Windows games to Intel-based Macs:

Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on
an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32
APIs. Games are simply wrapped up in the Cider engine and they
work on the Mac. This means developers only have one code base
to maintain while keeping the ability to target multiple
platforms. Cider powered games use the same copy protection,
lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original. All
this means less work and lower costs. Cider is targeted at game
developers and publishers and, unlike Cedega, is not an end user
product.

The Washington Post’s Brian Krebs reports on a supposed wireless networking exploit that allows a MacBook to be hijacked. I smell bullshit, though — if you watch the video, the exploit apparently requires the MacBook to be using a third-party wireless card. Given that all MacBooks come with built-in AirPort support, how many MacBook users are actually susceptible to this? Any?

Worse, Krebs’s post makes no mention of this, instead making it sound as though the exploit works against MacBooks using their built-in wireless cards and drivers. If it’s truly the case that this particular exploit only works if a MacBook is using a third-party Wi-Fi card and driver software, it’s sensationalism at its worst — a case of supposed security experts impugning Apple’s reputation for the sole purpose of drawing attention to themselves.

Rather than write a blog entry about how to do this, I figured I would just go ahead and make a simple website hosted by Amazon S3 showing how to make a simple website hosted by Amazon S3 using Interarchy. Very recursive.

If you manually disable port 626 in Mac OS X Server’s firewall settings — which port is used by Apple for serial number checking — the serialnumberd daemon will re-enable it behind your back about a minute later.